Welcome to Windows 7 Forums. Our forum is dedicated to helping you find support and solutions for any problems regarding your Windows 7 PC be it Dell, HP, Acer, Asus or a custom build. We also provide an extensive Windows 7 tutorial section that covers a wide range of tips and tricks.

Windows 7: How to search multiple hard drives?

How do you search all hard drives, external hard drives and flash drives in windows 7? In win xp you could do this with a single click (might take some time for results tho), in windows 7 I am contently frustrated. Windows 7 does not search anything unless you index it (or open up a folder for every single little data source you want to search).

Is there a solution to this problem, or is this yet another one of the dozensthings win7 does worse then winxp?

edit: Solution:
1# Open up root of a drive
2# Do your search
3# Click on Customize under 'search again'
4# Expand the 'Computer' tree
5# Select each non-index drive you want to search and hit ok

What are you searching for ? don`t you keep your hard drives organized ?

I do keep things organized, but sometimes things slip thru, and when they do its a frustrating experience in windows 7.

Quote: Originally Posted by AddRAM

Open the drive start at the start at the top of the list and just use the arrow button, if you know what letter the file or folder starts with, hit that letter again and again to make the search even faster.

I am not sure what you are telling me to do here? I cannot even get ANY search going in windows 7 unless I explicitly open up a drive.

What are you searching for ? don`t you keep your hard drives organized ?

I do keep things organized, but sometimes things slip thru, and when they do its a frustrating experience in windows 7.

Quote: Originally Posted by AddRAM

Open the drive start at the start at the top of the list and just use the arrow button, if you know what letter the file or folder starts with, hit that letter again and again to make the search even faster.

I am not sure what you are telling me to do here? I cannot even get ANY search going in windows 7 unless I explicitly open up a drive.

Open the drive, and there everything is, just look for what you want, it`s your drive, you should know what`s on it. Go through the drive once a week, clean house. Create folders on your drives to store your data, keep it organized. There should never be any reason ever to use the search bar. The only reason I`ve ever used the search bar is to type dev to bring up the Device Manager, when and if I ever want to look at Device Manager. Any other time I`d just do it the normal way.

What are you searching for ? don`t you keep your hard drives organized ?

I do keep things organized, but sometimes things slip thru, and when they do its a frustrating experience in windows 7.

Quote: Originally Posted by AddRAM

Open the drive start at the start at the top of the list and just use the arrow button, if you know what letter the file or folder starts with, hit that letter again and again to make the search even faster.

I am not sure what you are telling me to do here? I cannot even get ANY search going in windows 7 unless I explicitly open up a drive.

Open the drive, and there everything is, just look for what you want, it`s your drive, you should know what`s on it. Go through the drive once a week, clean house. Create folders on your drives to store your data, keep it organized. There should never be any reason ever to use the search bar. The only reason I`ve ever used the search bar is to type dev to bring up the Device Manager, when and if I ever want to look at Device Manager.

You are completely missing the point. My entire problem is that my drives ARE clean and well organized, but when I do make a mistake or a file is lost I run into this problem.

Sounds you like are saying windows 7 cannot do a full search on all HDDs...

edit: and to clarify, my problem is not the *speed* of the search, my entire problem is I cannot get windows 7 to do ANY search unless I open the drive. So if I got 10 drives, I need to open up 10 folder and start 10 search.... What a massive pain. I am hoping there is an easier way.

I just typed the word Avatar in my search bar, it shows the avatar folder I have in My Pictures, it showed the Avatar folder I have on my Software drive and it showed the movie Avatar I have on one of my movie drives, so the problem is not with windows search.

All you have to do is click where I have the arrow to do an additional search on all your other drives.

I just typed the word Avatar in my search bar, it showes the avatar folder I have in My Pictures, it showed the Avatar folder I have on my Software drive and it showed the movie Avatar I have on one of my movie drives, so the problem is not with windows search.

That only works if you have indexing on for those drives. Clicking on the computer icon has no effect for me.

Edit: but clicking 'custom' does.... wow that is 100% what I was looking for. That allows me to click each HDD.

I edited my post, clicking 'custom' beside computer worked. It allowed me to pick the sources I wanted to search and I was FINALLY able to get correct results. Thanks for directing me towards that feature.

It is still kind of a pain and multiple steps to do this, but MUCH better then nothing.

How to search multiple hard drives?

search multiple drives in W7In XP I could select the drives when doing a search. I have two hard drives and when I do
a search in W7 it appears only C: is searched. Is there a setting for multiple drives?

General Discussion

my computer will only search one of my hard driveshello, i recently built my computer and it has four hard drives, a new SSD, and three HDDs all taken out from my old computers. when i open my start menu and type something in only the results from the SSD will come up, how do i fix this, also all my old HDDs still have their operating system on...

Hardware & Devices

BEST WAY TO? - Manage Multiple Hard Drives - Win 7 64-bitHi All,
I am going to be performing a clean install of Windows 7 64bit. I've been reading that it is generally a better idea to segregate the OS from applications from documents. I have always used the C: drive for everything and thought about giving this a try. I'd like to get some advice from...

General Discussion

Streaming to an Xbox 360 with multiple PC Hard-DrivesHello fellow members, I'm in a bit of a pickle.
You see, I installed my Windows 7 OS on a 200GB HDD. Recently, I installed a 500GB HDD in my PC. I used to be able to stream media files to my Xbox 360 with no problem with the media files being on the 200GB HDD. However, I've transferred all my...

Media Center

Question about multiple Hard drivesI'm gonna be moving from a 32-bit XP OS to the Windows 7 64-bit version. Before installing the OS, I'm gonna unplug my 2nd Hard drive where there's no OS installed, just storage.
Will I have to do anything special on the 2nd HD when I replug it in Windows 7? No reformatting is needed right?...

General Discussion

Question Search drives for multiple file extensionsI've made the move (fresh install on new HDD) from XP to Win7RC x64 (I never gave Vista a look) and I want to scan my old HDD partitions for *.xls;*.doc;*.dwg;*.jpg etc to make sure I haven't missed any old files which were not saved in the right place.
The two partitions are mounted as F:\ and...